Riverman #3 - The Spare Boat

 

 

The Riverman has a spare boat and sometimes he lets you stay the night. It’s concrete, stuck in the mud at low tide, and painted light blue. Black would attract too much sunlight and turn it into an oven in the summertime.

It’s a small boat but inside of it there’s room to think. There’s also empty wine bottles and several paintings of women. But not ordinary women, if there is such a thing. Magical women. Angles, witches, mermaids, golden-haired girls conversing with garden animals upon their rocking chairs. And if you do stay the night, you may catch them glancing at you, wondering in confusion at what kind of magical women you are. 

Then in the morning, a light awakens you all. Ripples dance, wriggle through the blinds, reflect the sunlight that mirrors the incoming tides. And as you lay, hearing the morning condensation drip upon your sleeping bag, the patterns also move inside of you.  They change you, because you too are like the muddy waters. And amongst all this beauty and the seagulls squawking above, you feel obliged to lay, watch the reflections fade, wait until the waters reach high enough to uplift the boat, unstick the concrete mass that cradles you.  Sludge and pop and you’re up! You and the little blue boat bobbing on the estuary of the Thames, buoyant for a lifetime. 

And when it’s time to leave, it never feels like the time to leave. One more tea? You feel sad already knowing that only a few metres away you will no longer hear the chirping birds, or see the crabs in the waters below fighting with the shadows of your dangling feet. Instead trains, trains and chaos, and gossip, and trains. Faster movement, and stuff. So much stuff. Useless stuff. 

“Oi leave it alone!”. 

The Riverman cuts the grass most mornings. Last week he saw an adder and he was concerned that it’s venomous hatchlings were hiding in long green. 

“It don’t belong to you, it’s private!”. 

But besides Adders, the riverman deters most passers-by. City folk who are naturally curious beyond their work-shirts, curious of why they never found a piece of land, like the riverman did, and called it their home, curious and wondering who it was that sold them a life of lies. The government? Their parents? Only ourselves. 

Then as you wave goodbye you smile, imaging that one day, like the riverman, you too will live in a boat, a boat of your own dreams, no matter who or what you have to deter.  How lucky are you to have made friends with the Riverman.

 

 

good morning Thames!

good morning birds! 

good morning water! 

good morning earth! 

  

good morning trucks 

good morning containers 

on your muddy river 

capital movement flows 

 

goodmorning ports 

good morning planes 

these skies welcome stuff 

more than the humans it birthed 

 

good morning pain 

good morning hope

I can only bless the chances 

that these tides will turn 

 

good morning good 

good morning evil 

my friends sail in purgatory

between your emphemeral worlds